Eden Medina

• Assistant Professor, Informatics
• Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of History

Education

• Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005

Contact Information

Eigenmann Hall, Rm. 1035

(812) 856-1871

Background

My research uses technology as both a source and a frame of analysis for understanding historical processes. I am particularly interested in how politics shape the form, function, and use of technology and how we might read the past through the design of technological systems. My current book manuscript The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile explores these themes by documenting the history of computation in Chile and the role computer technologies played in creating new forms of governance and advancing state ideological projects of developmentalism and socialism. More generally, my work contributes to scholarship in the history of technology, Latin American history, and the growing field of social informatics and I enjoy combining these fields in my writings and teaching. I have received grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. In addition to my Ph.D. in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology (MIT, 2005), I hold degrees in Electrical Engineering and Women’s Studies from Princeton University.

Selected Awards

Research Interests

• Social informatics
• Science and technology studies
• Modern Latin American history
• Chile
• Oral history and memory

Courses Recently Taught

• I400 Professionalization in Informatics
• I202 Introduction to Social Informatics
• I625 Advanced Social Informatics Seminar

Publication Highlights

Books

The State Machine: Politics, Ideology and Computation in Chile (manuscript in preparation).

Articles

“Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile.” Journal of Latin American Studies (forthcoming 2006).

“Democratic Socialism, Cybernetic Socialism: Making the Chilean Economy Public,” In Making Things Public. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 708-721.

“Computer Memory, Collective Memory: Recovering History Through Chilean Computing.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 27, 4 (2005): 102-104.